Actor, Writer, Speed Talker

The Paper Machete: Lincoln Square Nazis

Lincoln Square, a neighborhood as famous for its celebration of German heritage as for being a sanctuary for massive, artillery grade strollers capable of transporting 14 Calebs and 9 Addisons to a gelato cafe while mowing down pedestrians, has been besmirched. It’s been tagged, sullied, and tainted.

Lincoln Square has itself a Nazi problem.

First, a happy Yom Kippur to everyone. G'mar Hatima Tova, and may you all have an easy fast. (Sips drink). See how easy that was? Jewish people are in the middle of the high holidays. The new year of 5778 came in with the usual raucous celebrations, the streets of Chicago littered with blue and white streamers, garbage cans overflowing with apple cores and honey pots - just kidding, no one fucking cares. But even if you aren’t putting up your sukkah for Wednesday - it’s a hut you eat in outside because the harvest ok? - you should know that this time of year is not only important to the Jewish people, it’s a time that represents atonement, forgiveness, charity, and celebration of the earth’s bounty.

Lincoln Square’s bounty is usually children and sausages from Gene’s. Maybe beer from one of it’s nineteen Oktoberfests. This autumn, it’s lousy with knuckle-dragging white supremacists who are spray painting over Black Lives Matter signs. A garage door was tagged with, “Make Weimar Great Again,” and “SS,” both references to Adolf Hitler’s government and secret service.

The obvious commentary about why this kind of activity is seeing a bold uptick due to the country being run by the combined intellect, tolerance, and timeliness of an aborted contraceptive sponge, will be skipped this time. It’s a holiday.

In other parts of the neighborhood, “Diversity is white genocide” was spray painted on the sidewalk. White genocide, (UGH, eye roll), is the whiny war cry of meek ciswhite males afraid of giving up their cushy societal spot for fear someone will see all the CheezIt crumbs they’ve left behind. In pictures of the vandalism, one can see that there is a right angle, a sort of corner frame, on the upper left of the tag. So it wasn’t freehanded spray painting, clandestine yet wild strokes on a sidewalk as an exuberant expression of racist anger toward those who accept...you know...reality...no. This. This was a goddamned stencil. Somewhere, a white man - cause you know damn well it was a dude - went to Michael’s, and browsed the aisles full of porcelain ghosts and cornucopias, and found the stencils aisle. He bought not just regular stencils, but the ones that LOOK LIKE HANDWRITING…’cause it was important for this to be an authentic experience for everyone, and left with his purchase, only saddened by the fact that they wouldn’t sell him spray paint within city limits, since he planned to put “Cuck” on someone’s driveway in a nice Deep State Red. He had to settle for black, which...I’m sure hurt on some level. There are white supremacists...crafting. There are crafty Nazis running around Lincoln Square.

This is not said to minimize the hate crime carried out against at least 5 different homes, but rather to call out the sentient festering taintboil who committed it. Another sidewalk featured, “you will not replace us,” emblazoned across its concrete as a screaming reminder of Charlottesville and the atrocities committed by tiki torch wielding “fine people.” America is so deeply rooted in its racism, its growth entirely attributable to the blood in its soil and the inequity visible in the reach of its branches, that it cannot recognize its own makeup. Recognizing that the country, that the world, is not entirely or even mostly white is threatening to white people. Recognizing that we do not currently make things equal for all looks like oppression to white people. Recognizing that we can do better, that Black Lives Matter, that Hate Has No Home Here looks like replacement to white people. Replacement. That’s like saying that the chair next to yours is trying to obliterate your chair. It’s sitting there, waiting to take over your chair, you know it, it’s just there being an affront to decent chairs everywhere. Maybe it should go over to another part of the room with other empty chairs. Look, asshole. The chair next to you is just trying to exist at the same christing table as your chair. Stop shooting this fucking chair. There was a metaphor that has long since paid its tab and left, so this aside is totally fine. C’mere:

There is also a man in the same area, and in North Center and Ravenswood, inappropriately touching women and taking off on his bicycle. Some pushing their children in aforementioned humvee strollers or regular strollers. Just in case you thought the bottom feeders of humanity were carrying spray paint and were relegated to this story. The bottom is a myth and we descend forever past the midnight zone into the upside down. People are fucking terrible. Anyway.

Tomorrow, once the four or five Jews still fasting on Yom Kippur have have gone back to eating and sinning like the rest of us, there will be an event in Lincoln Square distributing anti-hate signs throughout the area. There are about 3,000 Hate Has No Home Here and Black Lives Matter signs to blanket the neighborhood, starting at 11am at Waters Elementary, 4500 N. Campbell Ave. The idea, of course, is that the one house where the sign is immediately taken down is the one providing refuge to the white supremacist. The neighbors are smoking him out through signage. He will then be stoned accordingly.

That’s not happening. People are just putting up signs as a show of solidarity and as a message to the white supremacists who are less supreme than a burrito from Taco Bell. That message is, “You do not speak for us.” It is, “We outnumber you, and you will not win.” And THEN they’re gonna pelt the fuckers with apples from Apple Fest while beating them with cadillac strollers until they cry, “cuck.”